Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Because they have grown to expect his presence, they do not know how to respond to his absence, and they stand uncertainly in the foyer for several minutes, talking more loudly than usual in hopes that he will hear them and appear, but finally they decide that they better check on him, so they rap quietly at the door to his quarters, quietly because they are from Minnesota and this act goes against all they believe in. They can hear activity inside — the swish of fabric and voices, low and urgent — but when the hotelier finally comes to the door and peers out, they see that he is crying, and neither of them knows what to say.

“Yes?” he asks finally, and Sheila blurts out something about missing their afternoon tea. He studies them impassively for a moment and says, “Fine, I shall make tea. Please wait in the foyer.” Though they both try to explain that that is not what Sheila had meant, he closes the door, and they have no choice but to go to the foyer and wait. When he enters carrying a tray and bends to place it on the table in front of them, they see first that he has brought only two cups and then that his right eye, which he had made an effort to turn away from them before, is puffy with the first traces of bruising.

“What happened to your eye?” asks Bernadette before she can think better of it.

“Please do not study my eye,” replies the hotelier, and neither woman can decide whether he has used the word study accidentally, because his French is limited, or intentionally, a purposeful attempt to infuse the conversation with a formality that would preclude further discussion. In any case, it achieves the latter effect, and the two sit drinking their tea, which is so sweet that their teeth and tongues thicken with sugar and feel too large for their mouths. As they walk down the hallway to their room, they pause beside the hotelier, who has settled in at his window seat, and though they call out a mumbled good evening, he does not return their greeting, does not even turn toward them, and once they are back in their room and changing into their nightshirts, they do not discuss the hotelier because they are both too overcome by sadness.

They awaken early the next morning, and though they have slept well, the sadness has only intensified, has become so powerful that each woman feels the room cannot accommodate the two of them and it, and so they dress quickly and, without speaking about it first, pack their bags and set them by the door.

“Well,” says Bernadette, “I guess this is it.”

“Yes,” Sheila agrees, “I guess it is.”

“Ladies,” the hotelier sings out when they appear in the foyer with their backpacks. His eye is in full color now, but he makes no attempt to hide it as he had done the night before. “Please, let us have some tea together.” He gestures toward his quarters, and, because they are leaving, they feel that they cannot say no. They find his low table set with three teacups as well as a loaf of bread, jam, and a small plate of olives, the three cushions arranged neatly around it, and he allows them to survey it for a moment before urging them, with a graceful sweep of his arm, in the direction of it all.

“I am sorry, ladies, about the difficulties,” he tells them once they are seated, his voice strangely animated. “My nephew, you see. He came for a visit.” He turns his attention to pouring the tea, and the women look around the room one last time, trying not to fidget, though they are anxious to leave, to make a first step toward departure, even one that will mean sitting in the market for another two hours awaiting the arrival of the bus. Nearby, so close, in fact, that they wonder how they could not have noticed them immediately, are the Richard Chamberlain photographs, in shreds, laid out on the open prayer rug. Somebody, presumably the hotelier, has attempted to mend them, but with limited success, the resulting composites bringing together features of the actor from conflicting decades, drastically differing hairstyles and clothing, a facial topography of wrinkles that appear and disappear and then appear again.

The hotelier acknowledges the damage with a shrug. “My nephew,” he says sadly but then, perhaps because they both look guiltily away from the photographs, he adds almost cheerfully, “There is nothing that can be done, but he will bring me others. Better ones. He is sorry for what he has done.” Giving a small, authoritative clap of his hands first in Bernadette’s direction and then in Sheila’s, he orders them, “Eat, please,” and they both take up their bread, on which he has spread jam, and begin the process of chewing and swallowing.

Nothing more is said as they finish eating, drink one cup of tea, and accept, though do not drink, a second, but when they stretch their legs in anticipation of leaving, the hotelier rises first and prepares to speak. He stands before them for perhaps forty seconds, clearing his throat repeatedly until both women fear that he might have a piece of bread lodged in it, but at last he stops, gasps once, and his hands, twin birds that generally flutter about excitedly when he speaks, dart inside the sleeves of his djellaba and are still.

“You see, I love him, and that must be considered,” he announces, ceremoniously and with great finality, and only now do the women understand how much they have come to rely on his hands, their fluttering, distracting lightness. He smiles at them both then, sweetly, and in the awkward silence that ensues, the women begin to move away from each other, distractedly, their buttocks rotating on the scratchy woolen cushions until they are sitting with their backs nearly touching, faces cast in opposite directions, as though they can no longer bear the thought of their eyes resting on the same things. To a third party, not the hotelier but a casual observer, one able to take in, from a measured remove, both women at once, they might resemble a pair of matching bookends that have drawn more closely together in order to accommodate the steadily depleting collection of books that they once held between them.

Later, when Harold finally learned that his parents had not fired Mrs. Norman, the babysitter, for locking him in the closet while she watched her favorite television shows, he could not imagine why he had ever attributed her firing to this in the first place, especially since his parents had not seemed particularly upset by the news of his confinement. His father had said something vague about it building character and teaching inner resources, and his mother, in an attempt to be more specific, said that it could not hurt to learn how the sightless got by. Nor had Harold minded being in the closet, where he kept a survival kit inspired by the one that his parents, indeed all Minnesotans, stored in their cars in winter, though his contained only a small flashlight, several books, water, and a roll of Life Savers, chosen because he liked the surprise — there in the dark — of not knowing which flavor was next.

Furthermore, he understood Mrs. Norman’s motivations, which had to do with the fact that if he were allowed to watch television with her, he would inevitably ask questions, which she would feel obligated to answer, thus diminishing her concentration and so her pleasure. Her concerns seemed to him reasonable: he had a tendency to ask questions, for he was a curious child (though awkwardly so), a characteristic that his teachers cited as proof in making comments both positive and negative.

Mrs. Norman, it turned out, had been fired because she sometimes wore his father’s socks while she watched television, slipping them on over her own bare feet. It was the bare part that completely unhinged his father, who did not like to drink from other people’s glasses or sit in the dentist’s chair while the dentist stood close to him smelling of metal. One night, Mrs. Norman left a pair of his father’s socks on the sofa instead of putting them back in his father’s drawer, and when his father asked her about it, she said, “Oh my, I took them off when my toes got toasty and forgot all about them,” apologizing as though the issue were the forgetting and not the wearing. This had further angered Harold’s father, who considered the sharing of socks — his naked feet where hers had been — an intimacy beyond what he could bear, and after he talked about it “morning, noon, and night for two days,” as Harold’s mother later put it, they fired Mrs. Norman.